"These sensors are wired to the lights and sirens of the vehicle, so that they get priority when approaching intersections. How hard is it to tie these sensors to the red-light cameras so that they're disabled while the emergency vehicle has to go through the intersection?"
Cop stops at a red light.
Cop sees the "Hot Donuts Now" sign illuminated at the Krispy Kreme half a block down the street.
Cop turns on the lights for the sake of running the red light to get to said hot donuts.
Delivering pizza, I've lost count of the number of times I've seen a cop car turn on the lights just long enough to get through an inconvenient red light. Just because the officer in the car flips a switch doesn't always mean he's doing something that the switch is intended for.
"I just installed my WiiKey (Wii Modchip) 2 hours ago..why?.. cos I wanna buy cheap crap from china? HELL NO.. but cos I live in EUROPE and as most europeeans I am megaSICK of always getting hardware.. AND software.. last.. if not at all.."
You got a mod chip for the only one of the three consoles that was released in Europe at the same time as North America and Japan because you don't like having to wait behind other markets?
"They stop charging twice the price for a game over here as opposed to USA.. it does NOT cost twice as much to ship a game made in CHINA to Europe as opposed to USA"
My copy of Twilight Princess says "Made in Japan."
VAT's a bitch
Localization's a bitch
Distance isn't the only factor in calculating shipping cost. Are you sure the game you're playing went through the Suez Canal and not the Panama Canal?
"Stop releasing games in USA months before they come out here...... have SIMOULTANEOUS RELEASES"
If the game is made in the US (e. g. Electronic Arts) by an English-speaking crew with English dialog, etc, why should we have to wait until it's been translated into French/German/Italian before we get to play it? We want to buy it, they want to sell it, the fact that others will have to wait longer is no reason to interrupt that transaction.
"and I see the Europeean release date is.. NOVEMBER!!!!..and I can install a tiny chip.. download an iso.. burn it and play it WHILE I HAVE FRIENDS ONLINE WHO ALSO PLAY IT.."
Or you could buy and import a legitimate copy, and then marvel how the price goes up when you have to pay customs and VAT upon delivery (teaching you just how much more it does cost to ship to Europe).
"as opposed to playing it after they are sick of it and have moved on.. ofcourse I will..!.."
Do you really want to buy a game that all your North American friends are sick of in less than seven months? Or are you less concerned about the game and more about the bandwagon?
"the splitting of the world might have worked back when the occasional long distance phonecall every 3 months was all the communication we had but these days that does not cut it."
"As a PS3 owner, I hope this lays down the gauntlet to Sony. Currently the PS3 is pretty pathetic as a media hub despite having oodles of grunt available."
I would hope Sony fixes the interface first. Aside from the terrible waste of screen real-estate the "Xross Media Bar" tends to be, showing little useful information, it expects media to be in certain peculiar directories and to access, say, music in a directory called "MP3," you need some non-intuitive, unlabeled button presses to browse the directories on your media card. Even some little note on the bottom of the screen, "Press Triangle to browse directories," would be something! For being a GUI, I've seen more verbose CLIs (when did ed get a graphical shell?).
The interface for online content delivery needs an overhaul as well. I'm more interested in games, so I haven't looked at the media offerings, but if they're arranged anything like their game offerings, they have quite a ways to go to catch up to XPL Marketplace. One thing I find particularly annoying about the games (especially compared to XBL Arcade or Wii Shopping Channel) is that at least half of the description of each game offered is filled with legal disclaimers, and the website, supposedly designed with the PS3 browser in mind, is set up so that, navigating with the d-pad, you must scroll through all of the legalese just to get to the "buy" and "go back" buttons at the bottom. Combine that with the way that only three or four titles are shown per page when you browse the library (the top half of every page is wasted on logos/branding), and you have a fairly frustrating experience, especially compared to the competition.
That would be interesting, except that the quality of streamed video and sound over the Remote Play feature leaves a lot to be desired; supposedly it actually works better with homebrew code.
As it is, you can't even use your PSP to start up Folding@Home.
Perhaps one day, there'll be some sort of PSP/PS3 connectivity along the same lines as what you saw between the GameCube and Game Boy Advance. Whether or not it will be enough to distract gamers from the Wii/DS connectivity planned to be unveiled with the new Pokemon games remains to be seen.
"Then why do they adjust the cesium-based clock to match the vagaries of the earth's rotation and orbit (i.e. the distance between two consecutive noons) every few months?"
To shift the hours of daylight to where they're more convenient. And we don't shift the clocks to adjust for the equation of time.
"But they are, give or take the odd leap-second mentioned above. Oh yeah, and the one time every year when a whole friggin' hour disappears, only to re-appear several months later!"
That doesn't effect the length of those hours. If you insist on rigorously following the sun, an "eight hour day" is longer on some days than others.
"why is it the only the pro-DST brigade who - after deliberately putting themselves out of step with observed reality"
My point was, in spite of the original poster's insistence, nobody is "in step with observed reality." With or without Daylight Saving Time, the sun is directly overhead at noon, at best, four times a year.
"insist that everyone else is wrong and should follow them?"
Exactly the stance taken by the original poster, only against DST. Either way, either "everybody does it" or standard time itself breaks down. That being the case, in a world where the vast majority enjoy having more sunlight in the afternoon than the morning, why should they bow to the will of the minority?
"yes, you should be getting up and scheduling your day so that you are able to "use" the daylight in the way you wish."
Well, in order to do that, I'd have to get everybody I do business with to alter their schedules as well, and they'd have to do the same with everybody they do business with, and everybody they do business with, and everybody they do business with and... gee, maybe we should have an agreed-upon standard for this whole "adjust our schedule to follow daylight hours" thing. We could call it... Daylight Saving Time!
OP is bitching about being in the slim minority that doesn't want to change. It's his right to bitch, but he's going to have to do some serious legwork to convince everybody between him and Kevin Bacon to abandon it.
"Back in the day, when people's interactions were mostly local, time zones might have been harmless."
That's funny. Standard time and the resulting time zones came about because there were more interactions on a national and even global scale, thanks to railroads, telegraphs and radio. Keeping the time difference between two points an integer number of hours is far more preferable to what preceded it: everybody using local mean time for their own meridian. Would you like to keep track of the ~12 minute time difference between New Orleans and Chicago? The ~16 minute difference between San Francisco and Los Angeles? The ~12 minute difference between New York and Boston?
"They're just a PITA -- time is an arbitrary number anyway, so who cares if the clock says 6pm or 6am when you wake up?"
We're a diurnal species. If mechanical time did not approximate solar time to some degree, the former would be abandoned for the latter.
"Imagine having every computer (and every log, timestamp, calendar, etc.) in the world on GMT. Imagine scheduling conference calls and not having someone confuse which time zone it was scheduled for."
Imagine a world where not everybody's job involves timestamps, computer logs, or conference calls. Or, instead of imagining, experience reality a little instead.
At any rate, if it works so well, use your life as an example and set all your personal timepieces to UTC.
"Fine. You like more light. GET UP EARLIER. And leave my clock alone."
No, you should get up later instead.
"The clock reflects astronomical realities of earth/sun positioning."
Nope, it reflects oscillations of a cesium atom. Far more regular and periodic than, say, the time between two consecutive noons.
"Noon is supposed to mean the sun is overhead, mid-day."
If I recall, there are only four days a year when local solar noon and local mean noon are the same thing, and neither have anything to do with standard time, unless you're standing on a meridian that's a multiple of 15.
"Cocky people then decide they don't like that arrangement, and declare what _is_ shall be different from what they _want_ reality to be."
If we're getting paid by the hour, we want our hours to be of a consistent length.
"doesn't change the fact that it's really 5:00AM,"
Is that standard time, local solar time or local mean time?
"Seriously, man - it really messes up my internal clock. Midnight to six is my time to _sleep_; mess with that, and you're messing with my ability to function."
Then maybe it's time for you to find a job that lets you sleep later.
"You want more light? YOU get up earlier. Leave my clock alone; I'll be a lot more productive that way."
One of the complaints I had about the PS3 was that, once you bought the cheaper SKU, you're locked into it, unable to "upgrade" it to the more expensive one, which contrasted with the difference between the two versions of the Xbox 360. With this addition of this HDMI port, one that can't be added to the console that's sitting on my shelf, however, the Xbox 360 loses this advantage.
However, this probably won't affect sales of the Xbox 360 one way or the other. Current owners aren't likely to run out and buy a second Xbox 360 because of it, but they won't be getting rid of their old one either. The real problem, however, will be in a few years when it's time to release the next generation of consoles, and customers start saying "I'm really looking forward to the next Xbox, but I think I'll wait a year or so after launch for the 'elite' version to come out."
Oh excitement is all well and good, but not in the middle of my morning commute! Excitement in my life should be on my terms, not because some asshat on the road can't cope with being behind another car for any reason at all.
"Maybe people who like to drive fast can't drive as fast as they want, so they pop in a racing game simulater."
Except the subjects never gamed before the experiment, and showed a marked decrease in safe driving skills before and after the gaming session.
"As far as the shooter game comment, most young men are aggressive to one extent or another."
"Young men" aren't "boys," they're adult homo sapiens, supposedly capable of some degree of rational thought, and resisting such animalistic urges to participate in a civilized society. If these young men are unable to resist these urges, it's their responsibility to hand over the car keys, and those who aren't able to even recognize the problem should have their keys taken away from them.
"If someone blows off some steam by playing Halo 3, I would prefer that to them blowing off someone's head in real life."
And what if it is definitively shown that playing Halo, by itself, makes one more willing to go off and shoot real people? Are we to continue putting our own lives in jeopardy for the sake of someone else's irresponsible behavior, all in the name of "free will?" Freedom to play video games... where's my freedom from car accidents?
Hand-waves like "It's only correlation, not causation!" or "This is discounted by my anecdotal evidence!" will only get you so far in trying to discount something. When was the last time you managed to get through an entire day without driving faster than the posted speed limit?
Instead of regulating violence as well as obscenity and sex, how about they regulate violence instead of obscenity and sex? Still not the preferred option of "Let the V-Chip do its job," but it seems far more palletable than the current state of affairs.
"I'll remember to only accept antique grandfather clocks with radio controls."
You're complaining about having to twice-yearly adjust clocks that need daily adjustments as it is?
"Earlier sunrise? There's no earlier sunrise, we just assign a different numeric value to the time coordinate associated with the sunrise."
The sun doesn't rise earlier in the summer than it does in the winter? You're one of those flat-earth folks, aren't you?
"If you don't look at the clock, nothing changes."
Tilt of the earth, Kepler's laws and the equation of time... sunrise, sunset, and even solar noon wander all over the place throughout the course of the year, it's why we use mechanical timepieces to begin with. But as long as we don't count those pesky constant atomic seconds, "nothing changes?" Do you have to stick your fingers in your ears while you do this?
"replace a simple $9.99 clock with a more complicated $29.99 clock"
Then we've established that the time you spent setting clocks isn't worth $20. Does that include the time you spend complaining about it?
"So no, I wake up when I wake up and it doesn't suddenly shift by an hour because someone said so."
You'd rather have to adjust clocks daily to keep up with that earlier sunrise?
"So no, I wake up when I wake up and it doesn't suddenly shift by an hour because someone said so."
Most people have already chosen when they wake up: as shortly before work as possible. However, they don't get to choose when they get home from work, except through state legislative action like this.
"Have you ever considered that your rigid sleep schedule that isn't in tune with sunrise and sunset is the problem?"
I'll just have to adjust "my" rigid sleep schedule? I, like the vast majority of people in this country, don't work on flex time. The only way that's going to happen is if the Big Mean government gets involved and changes everybody's schedule by legal decree and, oh, wait...
Slashdot Mirror
"These sensors are wired to the lights and sirens of the vehicle, so that they get priority when approaching intersections. How hard is it to tie these sensors to the red-light cameras so that they're disabled while the emergency vehicle has to go through the intersection?"
Cop stops at a red light.
Cop sees the "Hot Donuts Now" sign illuminated at the Krispy Kreme half a block down the street.
Cop turns on the lights for the sake of running the red light to get to said hot donuts.
Delivering pizza, I've lost count of the number of times I've seen a cop car turn on the lights just long enough to get through an inconvenient red light. Just because the officer in the car flips a switch doesn't always mean he's doing something that the switch is intended for.
You got a mod chip for the only one of the three consoles that was released in Europe at the same time as North America and Japan because you don't like having to wait behind other markets?
"They stop charging twice the price for a game over here as opposed to USA.. it does NOT cost twice as much to ship a game made in CHINA to Europe as opposed to USA"
"Stop releasing games in USA months before they come out here...... have SIMOULTANEOUS RELEASES"
If the game is made in the US (e. g. Electronic Arts) by an English-speaking crew with English dialog, etc, why should we have to wait until it's been translated into French/German/Italian before we get to play it? We want to buy it, they want to sell it, the fact that others will have to wait longer is no reason to interrupt that transaction.
"and I see the Europeean release date is.. NOVEMBER!!!!..and I can install a tiny chip.. download an iso.. burn it and play it WHILE I HAVE FRIENDS ONLINE WHO ALSO PLAY IT.."
Or you could buy and import a legitimate copy, and then marvel how the price goes up when you have to pay customs and VAT upon delivery (teaching you just how much more it does cost to ship to Europe).
"as opposed to playing it after they are sick of it and have moved on.. ofcourse I will..!.."
Do you really want to buy a game that all your North American friends are sick of in less than seven months? Or are you less concerned about the game and more about the bandwagon?
"the splitting of the world might have worked back when the occasional long distance phonecall every 3 months was all the communication we had but these days that does not cut it."
Because all the world speaks English?
/cough Sony /cough
"As a PS3 owner, I hope this lays down the gauntlet to Sony. Currently the PS3 is pretty pathetic as a media hub despite having oodles of grunt available."
I would hope Sony fixes the interface first. Aside from the terrible waste of screen real-estate the "Xross Media Bar" tends to be, showing little useful information, it expects media to be in certain peculiar directories and to access, say, music in a directory called "MP3," you need some non-intuitive, unlabeled button presses to browse the directories on your media card. Even some little note on the bottom of the screen, "Press Triangle to browse directories," would be something! For being a GUI, I've seen more verbose CLIs (when did ed get a graphical shell?).
The interface for online content delivery needs an overhaul as well. I'm more interested in games, so I haven't looked at the media offerings, but if they're arranged anything like their game offerings, they have quite a ways to go to catch up to XPL Marketplace. One thing I find particularly annoying about the games (especially compared to XBL Arcade or Wii Shopping Channel) is that at least half of the description of each game offered is filled with legal disclaimers, and the website, supposedly designed with the PS3 browser in mind, is set up so that, navigating with the d-pad, you must scroll through all of the legalese just to get to the "buy" and "go back" buttons at the bottom. Combine that with the way that only three or four titles are shown per page when you browse the library (the top half of every page is wasted on logos/branding), and you have a fairly frustrating experience, especially compared to the competition.
I loved it. It was much better than Cats. I'm going to play it again and again.
That would be interesting, except that the quality of streamed video and sound over the Remote Play feature leaves a lot to be desired; supposedly it actually works better with homebrew code.
As it is, you can't even use your PSP to start up Folding@Home.
Perhaps one day, there'll be some sort of PSP/PS3 connectivity along the same lines as what you saw between the GameCube and Game Boy Advance. Whether or not it will be enough to distract gamers from the Wii/DS connectivity planned to be unveiled with the new Pokemon games remains to be seen.
"all you have left is a couple of dumb drunk teenage girls who have no idea whats going on."
I am intrigued by your ideas and would like to subscribe to your newsletter!
What if Sony tried to gear the PSP to the gamer market instead?
... there's a joke here somewhere comparing the library of games for Linux to the library of games for the PS3.
"There's no point building the hardware if nobody really wants it"
So there's people scrambling for HDCP in their Xbox 360s?
"Yeah, they're, like, up to 0.9 of a whole second different."
Try fifteen minutes, or half an hour between maximums. Something to consider if you're truly committed to following the sun.
"Then why do they adjust the cesium-based clock to match the vagaries of the earth's rotation and orbit (i.e. the distance between two consecutive noons) every few months?"
To shift the hours of daylight to where they're more convenient. And we don't shift the clocks to adjust for the equation of time.
"But they are, give or take the odd leap-second mentioned above. Oh yeah, and the one time every year when a whole friggin' hour disappears, only to re-appear several months later!"
That doesn't effect the length of those hours. If you insist on rigorously following the sun, an "eight hour day" is longer on some days than others.
"why is it the only the pro-DST brigade who - after deliberately putting themselves out of step with observed reality"
My point was, in spite of the original poster's insistence, nobody is "in step with observed reality." With or without Daylight Saving Time, the sun is directly overhead at noon, at best, four times a year.
"insist that everyone else is wrong and should follow them?"
Exactly the stance taken by the original poster, only against DST. Either way, either "everybody does it" or standard time itself breaks down. That being the case, in a world where the vast majority enjoy having more sunlight in the afternoon than the morning, why should they bow to the will of the minority?
"yes, you should be getting up and scheduling your day so that you are able to "use" the daylight in the way you wish."
Well, in order to do that, I'd have to get everybody I do business with to alter their schedules as well, and they'd have to do the same with everybody they do business with, and everybody they do business with, and everybody they do business with and... gee, maybe we should have an agreed-upon standard for this whole "adjust our schedule to follow daylight hours" thing. We could call it... Daylight Saving Time!
OP is bitching about being in the slim minority that doesn't want to change. It's his right to bitch, but he's going to have to do some serious legwork to convince everybody between him and Kevin Bacon to abandon it.
"I wonder how much it would cost to build a vaccuum tunnel to run very high speed train in at a fraction of the power required by the TGV..."
Would the gain in energy offset the loss created by having to lug around your own oxidizer?
"Back in the day, when people's interactions were mostly local, time zones might have been harmless."
That's funny. Standard time and the resulting time zones came about because there were more interactions on a national and even global scale, thanks to railroads, telegraphs and radio. Keeping the time difference between two points an integer number of hours is far more preferable to what preceded it: everybody using local mean time for their own meridian. Would you like to keep track of the ~12 minute time difference between New Orleans and Chicago? The ~16 minute difference between San Francisco and Los Angeles? The ~12 minute difference between New York and Boston?
"They're just a PITA -- time is an arbitrary number anyway, so who cares if the clock says 6pm or 6am when you wake up?"
We're a diurnal species. If mechanical time did not approximate solar time to some degree, the former would be abandoned for the latter.
"Imagine having every computer (and every log, timestamp, calendar, etc.) in the world on GMT. Imagine scheduling conference calls and not having someone confuse which time zone it was scheduled for."
Imagine a world where not everybody's job involves timestamps, computer logs, or conference calls. Or, instead of imagining, experience reality a little instead.
At any rate, if it works so well, use your life as an example and set all your personal timepieces to UTC.
"Fine. You like more light. GET UP EARLIER. And leave my clock alone."
No, you should get up later instead.
"The clock reflects astronomical realities of earth/sun positioning."
Nope, it reflects oscillations of a cesium atom. Far more regular and periodic than, say, the time between two consecutive noons.
"Noon is supposed to mean the sun is overhead, mid-day."
If I recall, there are only four days a year when local solar noon and local mean noon are the same thing, and neither have anything to do with standard time, unless you're standing on a meridian that's a multiple of 15.
"Cocky people then decide they don't like that arrangement, and declare what _is_ shall be different from what they _want_ reality to be."
If we're getting paid by the hour, we want our hours to be of a consistent length.
"doesn't change the fact that it's really 5:00AM,"
Is that standard time, local solar time or local mean time?
"Seriously, man - it really messes up my internal clock. Midnight to six is my time to _sleep_; mess with that, and you're messing with my ability to function."
Then maybe it's time for you to find a job that lets you sleep later.
"You want more light? YOU get up earlier. Leave my clock alone; I'll be a lot more productive that way."
No thanks, I prefer coming home before sunset.
"Reuters spoke with Jason Cuevas, spokesman for Southern Co. power,"
And what about from points further away from the Equator?
"Let's be realistic. Star Wars is popular to the point of becoming a cultural phenomenon,"
And then the prequels came out.
Is it that Serenity is that good, or that Star Wars has fallen so far?
One of the complaints I had about the PS3 was that, once you bought the cheaper SKU, you're locked into it, unable to "upgrade" it to the more expensive one, which contrasted with the difference between the two versions of the Xbox 360. With this addition of this HDMI port, one that can't be added to the console that's sitting on my shelf, however, the Xbox 360 loses this advantage.
However, this probably won't affect sales of the Xbox 360 one way or the other. Current owners aren't likely to run out and buy a second Xbox 360 because of it, but they won't be getting rid of their old one either. The real problem, however, will be in a few years when it's time to release the next generation of consoles, and customers start saying "I'm really looking forward to the next Xbox, but I think I'll wait a year or so after launch for the 'elite' version to come out."
"We could live in a world without excitement."
Oh excitement is all well and good, but not in the middle of my morning commute! Excitement in my life should be on my terms, not because some asshat on the road can't cope with being behind another car for any reason at all.
"Maybe people who like to drive fast can't drive as fast as they want, so they pop in a racing game simulater."
Except the subjects never gamed before the experiment, and showed a marked decrease in safe driving skills before and after the gaming session.
"As far as the shooter game comment, most young men are aggressive to one extent or another."
"Young men" aren't "boys," they're adult homo sapiens, supposedly capable of some degree of rational thought, and resisting such animalistic urges to participate in a civilized society. If these young men are unable to resist these urges, it's their responsibility to hand over the car keys, and those who aren't able to even recognize the problem should have their keys taken away from them.
"If someone blows off some steam by playing Halo 3, I would prefer that to them blowing off someone's head in real life."
And what if it is definitively shown that playing Halo, by itself, makes one more willing to go off and shoot real people? Are we to continue putting our own lives in jeopardy for the sake of someone else's irresponsible behavior, all in the name of "free will?" Freedom to play video games... where's my freedom from car accidents?
Hand-waves like "It's only correlation, not causation!" or "This is discounted by my anecdotal evidence!" will only get you so far in trying to discount something. When was the last time you managed to get through an entire day without driving faster than the posted speed limit?
Instead of regulating violence as well as obscenity and sex, how about they regulate violence instead of obscenity and sex? Still not the preferred option of "Let the V-Chip do its job," but it seems far more palletable than the current state of affairs.
"I'll remember to only accept antique grandfather clocks with radio controls."
You're complaining about having to twice-yearly adjust clocks that need daily adjustments as it is?
"Earlier sunrise? There's no earlier sunrise, we just assign a different numeric value to the time coordinate associated with the sunrise."
The sun doesn't rise earlier in the summer than it does in the winter? You're one of those flat-earth folks, aren't you?
"If you don't look at the clock, nothing changes."
Tilt of the earth, Kepler's laws and the equation of time... sunrise, sunset, and even solar noon wander all over the place throughout the course of the year, it's why we use mechanical timepieces to begin with. But as long as we don't count those pesky constant atomic seconds, "nothing changes?" Do you have to stick your fingers in your ears while you do this?
"replace a simple $9.99 clock with a more complicated $29.99 clock"
Then we've established that the time you spent setting clocks isn't worth $20. Does that include the time you spend complaining about it?
"So no, I wake up when I wake up and it doesn't suddenly shift by an hour because someone said so."
You'd rather have to adjust clocks daily to keep up with that earlier sunrise?
"So no, I wake up when I wake up and it doesn't suddenly shift by an hour because someone said so."
Most people have already chosen when they wake up: as shortly before work as possible. However, they don't get to choose when they get home from work, except through state legislative action like this.
"Have you ever considered that your rigid sleep schedule that isn't in tune with sunrise and sunset is the problem?"
I'll just have to adjust "my" rigid sleep schedule? I, like the vast majority of people in this country, don't work on flex time. The only way that's going to happen is if the Big Mean government gets involved and changes everybody's schedule by legal decree and, oh, wait...
"I repeat DAYLIGHT SAVINGS TIME DOES NOT GIVE US MORE DAYLIGHT."
It takes hours of daylight through which I sleep and moves them into my waking hours. So I don't know about you, but it gives me more daylight.